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mjg59I bumped into Mark Shuttleworth today at Linuxcon and we had a brief conversation about Canonical's IP policy. The short summary:
The even shorter summary: Canonical won't clarify their IP policy because they believe they can make more money if they don't.
Why do I keep talking about this? Because Canonical are deliberately making it difficult to create derivative works, and that's one of the core tenets of the definition of free software. Their IP policy is fundamentally incompatible with our community norms, and that's something we should care about rather than ignoring.
- Canonical assert that the act of compilation creates copyright over the binaries, and you may not redistribute those binaries unless (a) the license prevents Canonical from restricting redistribution (eg, the GPL), or (b) you follow the terms of their IP policy. This means that, no matter what Dustin's blogpost says, Canonical's position is that you must ask for permission before distributing any custom container images that contain Ubuntu binaries, even if you use no Ubuntu trademarks in the process. Doing so without their permission is an infringement of their copyright.
- Canonical have no intention of clarifying their policy, because Canonical benefit from companies being legally uncertain as to whether they have permission to do something or not.
- Mark justifies maintaining this uncertainty by drawing an analogy between it and the perceived uncertainties that exist around certain aspects of the GPL. I disagree with this analogy pretty strongly. One of the main reasons for the creation of GPLv3 was to deal with some more ambiguous aspects of GPLv2 (such as what actually happened after license termination and how patents interacted with the GPL). The FSF publish a large FAQ intended to provide further clarity. The major ambiguity is in what a derivative work actually is, which is something the FSF can't answer absolutely (that's going to be up to courts) but will give its opinion on when asked. The uncertainties in Canonical's IP policy aren't a result of a lack of legal clarity - they're a result of Canonical's refusal to answer questions.
The even shorter summary: Canonical won't clarify their IP policy because they believe they can make more money if they don't.
Why do I keep talking about this? Because Canonical are deliberately making it difficult to create derivative works, and that's one of the core tenets of the definition of free software. Their IP policy is fundamentally incompatible with our community norms, and that's something we should care about rather than ignoring.
Ironic indeed...
Date: 2015-08-18 11:26 pm (UTC)That was in 2007. Although the post is a bit confused on the issue, it appears to be saying that Canonical will offer their products free as in free speech *and* free as in free beer, both the source code *and* the binary code, to completely level the playing field for everyone, and build a base that everyone can build on and improve freely. The bit about source code vs binary code is particularly apparent from Mark's answers to Greg DeKoenigsberg and Spencer Johnson in the comments:
"Applications, as you know, don’t run on source RPM’s. Hardware vendors don’t certify source RPM’s. Users don’t install source RPM’s. Really – how many vendors (hardware or software) certify CentOS? As far as I’m aware, none of any consequence. You know that’s true. So let’s talk about the real meat – the binaries that make up RHEL. As you are well aware, these are a closely controlled and licensed under terms very similar to those of any traditional proprietary software."
"When you say “all of Red Hat’s bits are free”, you mean “all of Red Hat’s published source code is free”. But applications do not run on source code, they run on binaries, and Red Hat’s BINARY bits are not free, are they?"
Re: Ironic indeed...
Date: 2015-08-19 07:45 am (UTC)I don't necessarily agree with Canonical's shift but IMHO I'm not surprised. It seems RedHat's been operating under this model since the beginning, effectively prohibiting binary derivatives and forcing complete archive rebuilds like CentOS, but without similar criticism. What am I missing?
Re: Ironic indeed...
Date: 2015-08-19 12:58 pm (UTC)Canonical on the other hand appear to be trying to restrict the use of their software by applying copyright law to their binaries. They explicitly say in their "intellectual property policy" that you can only redistribute Ubuntu where there has been no modification to it (then later that modified versions must not only remove trademarks, but must be recompiled).
Re: Ironic indeed...
Date: 2015-11-20 07:43 am (UTC)